While substantial reductions in the cost of data storage and increases in data processing or transfer speed of modern data processors, search engines, communication links and the like has provided the public and various enterprises with easy and rapid access to vast amounts of information, a limitation on efficiency of communication between a data processor or terminal and a user seeking particular information continues to be the ability of a user to assimilate information presented on a usually visual display device, referred to as a graphical user interface (GUI) or, simply user interface (UI). To a degree, the ability to assimilate information can be enhanced by graphic design of the presentation of information even though the attractiveness of the UI display may require the omission from the display image of information which may, in fact, be of interest to the user. In general, attractiveness of a UI is largely synonymous with “clean” and display of little or minimal and certainly abridged information, much less indicating the scope of available information or indication of how the additional information can be accessed while more information results in increased clutter of the UI which is difficult to review to locate the information of interest if the information of interest is, in fact, displayed. The incentive toward increased attractiveness of the displayed image is increased by its influence on the user to access information through particular facilities (e.g. particular applications or hardware) and/or resources (e.g. services, databases) that provide comparatively more attractive displayed images.
Further, the recent growth of electronic commerce is likely to provide further incentives toward attractive displayed images in which information about real world or virtual objects is presented in a unitary grouping as a virtual object where the attractiveness of the displayed image may convey strong inference of the desirability of the object that is represented. Indeed, at the present time, UIs are typically built on the concept of having users interact with virtual objects in much the same way they would interact with real world objects. For example, lists of so-called e-mail objects or icons or images representing them can represent letters written or printed on paper that could be (and previously were) mailed with a stamp. As a result, user interfaces have been developed to allow access to and interaction with many types of real or virtual objects which have previously been displayed in lists and tables, for example, with rows corresponding to particular objects and the respective properties of the objects organized in columns, which users could browse and from which users could select and then act upon. However, contemporary UI design standards and accepted practice have moved away from the traditional rows-and-columns format of such lists (e.g. menus which may be hierarchically nested) and tables, apparently in the interest of providing more visually attractive interfaces or images and emphasizing the nature of data records that parallel and represent existing real or virtual objects.
Currently popular UI virtual object designs use so-called pictured lists containing some type of graphic illustration and a listing or summary of only the properties of the object that are considered to be most important or most often of interest that more closely resembles an annotated photograph than a table. The chosen format often resembles a business card, both in layout and content. For example, in a modern list for music, the pictured list would contain, for a particular real world object, a picture of an album cover for a recording, the title of the album, the artist and the cost while much more information may be available (e.g. media on which the music is available, performance duration, technical data, production personnel, music type or category, date(s) of recording/performance, reviews and commentary and the like). It should be appreciated that such an association of an object identity and an arbitrary number of properties will exist for all real-world and virtual objects including more-or-less fungible commodities and chemical compositions and the data or database records representing them.
As a result of the trend toward more graphical portrayals of objects by UIs, many of the strengths and facilities of lists and tables such as easy filtering and sorting and locating of other objects having one or more desirable properties in common with a given object have been greatly de-emphasized and access to information which may be available has been made much more difficult by the use of the so-called pictured lists alluded to above. Even determining the properties for which data exists in storage for a given object may require difficult and complex user actions in regard to individual objects that is likely to be subject to user error.